


Mr. Andersen

by DontMindMeNow



Category: Inside Out (2015)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Coming Out, Gen, LGBTQ Character, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-27
Updated: 2016-02-09
Packaged: 2018-04-17 13:53:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4669070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DontMindMeNow/pseuds/DontMindMeNow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three years after the plot of the movie, Riley's father is worried. His daughter's personality has gone haywire; first she cut her hair extremely short, and now she's locking herself in her room without talking to her parents. What is going on? And can he handle what Riley will tell him when she reveals what drove her away?</p><p>UPDATE: New chapters addressing the emotional side of the story!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Original Piece: Bill's Perspective

**Author's Note:**

> Author’s Note: So I’m not a subscriber to the belief that canon Riley is transgender or genderfluid based on her mixed-gender emotions. However, I thought it would be interesting to look at a potential AU where, three years after the events of the movie (for the purposes of this fic, Inside Out takes place in 2012), Riley discovers that she might not be a she after all and is confronted by her parents about the changes they see Riley undergoing in looks and personality. I noticed that some of the existing trans-Riley fics were making her father out to be something of a bigot and decided to make a one-shot that countered with a reaction that more matched the character from the film.
> 
> Also, while this fic is told in third person, it’s primarily a reflection of Riley’s father’s perspective, and thus Riley will primarily be referred to with feminine pronouns, as Mr. Andersen comes to grips with her new identity. I sincerely hope I did not make any glaring mistakes with my depiction of gender dysphoria. Anyways, read on!

To say that Bill Andersen was a bit distraught was an understatement. He was absolutely shaken.

Of all the stressful deals and jobs he’d pulled off at work, of all the upheavals he gone through at home, moving cross-country and adjusting to a whole new life, and of all the family issues he’d dealt with over the years, none of them had made him fret as much as he was fretting now.

Even when Riley had run away, the incident was mercifully short. Now, Riley was drawing further and further away from him, and from Jill, even while still living at home. For over two months, Riley had been acting like a stranger in her own house.

At first, Riley was just spending some excessive time alone in her room. Then she started cutting her own hair. Extremely short cuts, too. It wasn’t a style that Bill approved of, but it wasn’t his decision to make. He thought she might have just been inspired by _Mad Max_. He’d offered to take her to a barber to get a more professional-looking short cut, but she changed the subject without answering. Soon, she stopped making conversation with her parents altogether. She would spend whole nights in her room, claiming she had lots of homework, but Bill could often hear her crying from behind the door. He’d attempted to intervene once, but she lost her temper and shut him out. He’d almost grounded her, but realized he didn’t understand what was going on and he couldn’t punish her for what must have been some strange misunderstanding. Plus, she never went out anymore anyways, for reasons he didn’t understand.

He wanted to understand, and he craved to know what was afflicting his daughter. He and Jill often had long discussions about what could be happening. The most obvious possibility was depression, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that something else was going on. Something was driving Riley mad. He thought about getting a psychologist involved, but even if he could afford it (which he most certainly could not), he worried that if he forced Riley to talk to someone else, she wouldn’t ever open up to her parents in retaliation.

Today he was fed up with the anxiety, with all the pressure and frustration of losing Riley to whatever was driving them apart. He had to force her hand. He was prepared for the worst of Riley’s wrath.

But of all the possibilities he considered, he never once thought of the truth. 

………………………… 

Bill stood in front of the door, listening to make sure she wasn’t crying. He needed Riley to not be upset. It was his best chance of getting her to open up.

“Riley, I need to talk to you!”

No answer. He hesitated, but ultimately opened the door. _This has to be done_ , he thought.

Riley’s head jerked up when she heard her father step into the room. He noticed her eyes. They were horribly bloodshot, with the appearance of one who had spent the whole night wide awake. He swallowed. It visibly disturbed him to see Riley in such a state.

“Riley, your mother and I were talking about going to the movies tonight. It’s been a long time and we thought you might want… to tag along. A while ago it sounded like you were really excited to see _Mission: Impossible_ ; were you still up for that?”

Bill noticed the shot of excitement that suddenly crossed Riley’s once-perpetually jovial face, but it was gone as fast as it appeared. “No, Dad, I… I don’t feel up to it.”

“Don’t feel up to it? All you do is sit in a chair, watch a screen and eat popcorn. Doesn’t take much effort.”

“No, Dad, I… I can’t." 

Bill sighed, closing the door behind him and sitting down in front of Riley, who was lying stomach-down on the floor. “Riley… talk to me. Please tell me what’s going on.”

“Nothing’s going on, Dad.”

“I know that’s not true, sweetheart. It’s been ages since you’ve talked to us. I forget you’re even home half the time. It barely feels like you’re here.” 

“Dad….”

“Please let me finish. It hurts, Riley. I don’t know if we’ve done something, or if you just don’t want to talk to us anymore, but this not knowing what is going on is hurting us. I don’t know if you’re hiding something, I can’t… I just cannot understand what you’re going through. We want to help, we desperately want to help, but…”

He swallowed, expecting Riley to interrupt. She didn’t.

“It just… it feels like you’re a different person. Everything about you just went topsy-turvy. Your hair is so short it looks like it belongs on a boy, you don’t go to hockey with us, you lock yourself in here all day, and… you’re never happy. It’s… it’s like I don’t even know you anymore…”

A tear slid down his face. “What happened, Riley? What won’t you tell us?”

Up until that point, Riley had been desperately trying to avoid his gaze, but something about being called “a different person” had snapped her to attention. And when she saw the little tear on his normally unshakably confident face, her resolve broke. The truth couldn’t be hidden anymore. 

“Oh, Dad…”

“Riley?”

“I just… just… just couldn’t tell you…” she stammered. “You’ll be so mad…”

“No, sweetheart…” he replied, desperately hoping her next words weren’t _I’m addicted to cocaine_ or _I’m wanted by the police_.

“It was all so sudden and I didn’t know what was going on, but suddenly… suddenly I couldn’t look at myself anymore, I saw my hair and I felt dirty and wrong, and every little detail about my body just felt horrible…”  

She gulped. Bill was taken aback. _All of this was just a body image problem?_

“But it’s not just some body image thing, it’s… I’m _different_ , Dad!”

She sat up and drew back from him. She cupped her face in her hands and whispered out three words that changed her life forever.

“ _I’m a boy_.”

 

……………………………

 

The weight of that sentence hit Bill like a freight train. He couldn’t think of anything he could possibly say.

He’d thought through every possible explanation, how he would keep in control for every possible outcome. Drugs, depression, bullying, even unthinkable scenarios like sexual harassment or worse, but never this. Not even once.

The idea of Riley as transgender hadn’t even existed as a possibility.

Riley slow raised her head to face her father, but was unable to comprehend the meaning of his expression. But she knew it wasn’t joy.

“I know… I know what you think about stuff like this… and I thought the same way too. That it was just a weird lifestyle, and that it didn’t make sense, and that no sane person could ever want to live that way…”

Tears starting streaming across her face. “And I didn’t think it was something that could just _happen_ to people but… but then… it just _happened_ … it happened to _me…_ and I couldn’t stop it…”

Riley sniffled and tried to compose herself. “I don’t know how to explain it, in a way that makes sense, but when I started… growing up… everything felt wrong. My hair felt wrong, my body felt wrong, and I felt wrong down there too…”

Bill was desperately trying to comprehend her words even as everything he knew about his daughter fell apart in front of him.

“And when my… my boobs started growing I just felt sick. It felt like they weren’t supposed to be there, like they weren’t even mine…”

She rubbed some of her tears off. “At first I thought I was just scared, that I was scared of growing up, and that I’d get used to it - but all the feelings never went away. And I started trying to look up what was wrong with me, and this was the only thing that made sense at all. I’m not supposed to look like this, I’m not _supposed_ to be a girl at all…”

Bill finally got the courage to open his mouth. “Oh, sweetheart…”

He opened his arms, and Riley climbed over to him and hugged him back. He listened to Riley sob for nearly five minutes.

She finally withdrew, still sniffling. “I didn’t ask for this. I never wanted this. I’m supposed to be your happy girl, it’s what you deserved. You’ve taken care of me for so long, you don’t deserve to deal with a problem like this…”

Bill had been scrounging to find things he could possibly say to comfort Riley, but those words finally gave him what he needed to reply.

“Riley, you’re not a problem. You could never be a problem for us no matter what happens to you. We want you to be happy, but we don’t want you to pretend to be fine when you’re not feeling fine. And…. something like this will mean we need to make a lot of changes, but it doesn’t mean we love you any less.”

“You’re not mad? You’re not mad at all?”

“I won’t lie, Riley. This is upsetting news. There are lots of things that your mother and I will be worried about now that we had never thought of before. We never imagined something this dramatic was going on, and I can’t begin to say I truly understand. But this is far better than not knowing. And we will work this out. We will get through this, together.”

To date, the smile that crossed Riley’s upon seeing her father’s acceptance was the biggest he’d ever seen.

Bill was far from ready to call Riley his son instead of his daughter. But it was a start. The two hugged once again, tears of joy streaming down their faces 

After a while, Bill noticed Riley chuckling. He glanced over. “What’s so funny,” he asked playfully. 

“Oh, it’s just something that popped into my head. It’s the stupid jingle from the Triple Dent Gum commercial. Remember that?”

Bill fished around in his head a little, before it suddenly came to him. “Oh, really Riley, you had to remind me of _that_! Now I’ll never get it out of my head!”

“At least you’re brain was kind enough to let you forget about it, it’s been bugging me for years!” Riley replied cheekily.

The two of them laughed heartily and began softly singing the little song.

_Triple Dent Gum will make you smile,_

_Triple Dent Gum – it lasts a while!_

_Triple Dent Gum will help you, mister,_

_To punch bad breath right in the kisser._

_Triple Dent Gum!_


	2. Emotional Side: Faded Lights

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Set prior to the first chapter. Expanding off the one-shot, we see the emotional side of Riley's issues. Sadness witnesses powerful and disturbing changes among her colleagues, and Joy seems to be losing all of her influence over Riley. Can Sadness do anything to help them?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For me, the original piece (the first chapter) was not “Inside Out-y” enough, and long ago I decided to write a second piece that took place from the perspective of the emotions. Seven months later, I decided to finally write it. So hope you all enjoy.
> 
> As with the first fic, this is written in third person, but primarily reflects the perspective of Sadness. Unlike Mr. Andersen, Sadness understands Riley’s identity, and uses masculine pronouns. (The emotions themselves are the same genders as in the film.)
> 
> This was originally intended to be another one-shot, but the writing isn’t going as quickly as I imagined, so I’m posting this as a multi-chapter short piece. I expect this to be no more than 3 additional chapters, ending with a depiction of the first chapter from the “Inside Out” perspective. The chapters representing the second piece are designated as "Emotional Side".
> 
> Also, as there were some questions about this, the reason I referred to Riley with feminine pronouns in the first “Author’s Notes” section was because I was referring to the canon character, who is female. It’s part of the problem with writing a character as a different gender than they are in canon. Hope that resolves the issue.

_Not again._  

A groan slipped from Joy as she slumped over the non-responsive control panel, which had gone dark at her touch. She lifted her head, staring helplessly at Sadness. With a knowing nod, the blue emotion shuffled over to her, but not before Joy had shamefully crumpled to the floor.

“You tried, Joy. It’ll work eventually.”

“That’s what you said last time.”

Sadness took Joy’s outstretched hand and hoisted her up to her feet. She shuddered. Joy’s physical shine had managed to dim even further than before. It was as if she was running on emergency power.

“Sadness, it’s getting worse.”

“No it’s not, Joy! Just today you managed to make 7 new happy memories! That’s the best you’ve done all week!”

“Yes, those 7 yellows look so spectacular amidst the 82 purples, 58 reds, and 119 greens.”

“…You forgot to mention the 138 blues.”

Joy smirked. “Okay, little miss narcissist.” There was a flash of momentary brightness, and Sadness felt the warmth of her friend’s light as it briefly crackled into existence. But just as quickly it had returned to its cold, faded state.

Sadness felt the cold, cruel irony of her need to cheer up Joy. She wasn’t used to it. She was supposed to simply be the shoulder to cry on, the empathizer, the one who could listen to problems and relate to them. But the unfortunate fact of the matter was that Joy need more than a therapist. She needed a coach, lest she forget the reason for her own existence.

Sadness turned to the control panel. Riley was staring blankly, helplessly in the mirror once again. What was he doing again? Ah right, he was about to take a shower. And Joy had wanted to indulge in Riley’s childhood habit of making funny faces in the mirror. But pointing Riley toward his own reflection was a bad mistake, and the panel had immediately cut off Joy’s access.

Disgust had compulsively taken control of the panel, as she was apt to do these days. She took no pleasure in what she did anymore. But anytime Riley’s train of thought was directed at his own body, Disgust felt an irresistible compulsion to take control. She couldn’t put her finger on it, ever, but there was just always something that felt _wrong_ that she had to fix. First it had simply been Riley’s clothes, which were just _way_ too girly. Then the hair was just simply too long. Then Riley’s breasts... 

It had all started innocently enough, but by this point Disgust was all too aware of just how potently she was affecting Riley. She couldn’t help but feel how much she’d failed her human. The emotion that was simply meant to keep Riley from being poisoned had become a toxic influence, unable to stop herself from doing damage. And Joy could not forgive her. Disgust had pleaded her case, but Joy only saw her as the reason Riley couldn’t feel happy anymore. 

In fact, Joy had become more or less estranged from all her colleagues, except Sadness. To her, the other emotions had just become enablers for Disgust’s compulsions. Anger had gotten into a terrible habit of lashing out when people questioned Riley’s appearance changes. If anyone who wasn’t a parent asked her about his hair, that person earned an angry snarl. And if anyone was foolhardy enough to ask something after that, Anger went full fireball. At this point, Riley had few friends left. Jordan was one of them, but even he was tentative whenever they talked.

Fear was no better. He had gotten it into his head that if Riley’s parents got even one hint of what was happening to him, the consequences would be unimaginable. The list of possible negative outcomes stacked immensely high, and items such as “spontaneous combustion” and “deadly meteor strike” had moved into the positive outcome list. As a result, Riley could now barely function when his parents were in the room. Anytime they asked how school went, he choked. Anytime they asked if Riley wanted a haircut, he dodged the subject. He couldn’t bring himself to go to the movies with them anymore, much less go out for dinner. In short, Fear’s overcompensation for Disgust’s actions had left Riley a nervous wreck.

But for all of her companions’ powerful changes, Sadness was most stunned by Joy. Months ago, Sadness never would have believed Joy could have ever become grimmer than she was during the moving incident. But as the control panel started to malfunction on her more and more, Joy had started finding it harder and harder to put a positive spin on it. At first she’d been happy to let Sadness take control more, and had assumed, like most of the stuff that had happened to her body for the past two years, that it was simply another side effect of puberty. But after weeks of nonresponsive buttons went by, Sadness had started to notice an edge in Joy’s voice. By two weeks ago, Joy had picked up a brutal snarl in her voice that intimidated even Anger. That was when she had started to blame the other emotions, lambasting Disgust even as she begged her to understand.

What made it all the more cruel for Sadness was that she, alone among the emotions, knew why this was happening.

Sadness ushered Disgust away from the panel, and Riley, snapping back to reality, turned and stepped into the shower.


End file.
